Book Review: The Ideology of Creole Revolution, by Joshua Simon

AuthorThea N. Riofrancos
Published date01 February 2019
Date01 February 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718771086
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews 133
The Ideology of Creole Revolution, by Joshua Simon. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017, 284 pp, US$29.99, ISBN 9781316610961 (pbk).
Reviewed by: Thea N. Riofrancos, Department of Political Science, Providence
College, Providence, RI, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718771086
At a moment in which the relations between the United States and much of
the rest of the hemisphere are, to put it mildly, strained, it might be difficult
to imagine another very different moment, one when patriotic leaders from
across the Americas were engaged in a shared political project of Creole rev-
olution and postcolonial state-making. As Joshua Simon’s incisive study, The
Ideology of Creole Revolution, shows, now-hardened national borders and
economic divides obscure the strikingly similar origins of what would
become the United States, Mexico, and the countries of hispanophone South
America. Creoles—European-descendent, American-born elites—forged
these polities through a mix of anti-imperial struggle and imperial territorial
expansion, a seemingly contradictory pairing that Simon dubs “anti-imperial
imperialism.” To explain this ideological orientation (and the constitutional
designs and foreign policy approaches it inspired), Simon offers a novel
interpretation of the expansive written oeuvre of three Creole revolutionaries:
Alexander Hamilton, Simon Bolívar, and Lucas Alamán. Conjoining com-
parative political theory, institutional analysis, and transatlantic history, his
elegant argument distills the core features of Creole ideology and grounds
them in Creoles’ unique class position.
Further, Simon demonstrates the advantage of a hemispheric perspective
on the political thought that accompanied the wars of independence across
the Americas. The study of these revolutionary upheavals is often siloed by
an assumption of US exceptionalism or by the prevailing approaches to the
history of the Atlantic world, which sharply contrast the British North
American and Spanish American colonies. As Simon shows, such anachro-
nistic accounts retrospectively project contemporary differences in political
and economic development, to tell an always-already story of Anglo-
American supremacy.
As Bolívar put it after his second unsuccessful attempt to establish an
independent republic in Venezuela, Creoles were “neither Indians nor
Europeans” but “Americans by birth, and Europeans by right” who “must
both dispute the claims of natives and resist external invasion”—a predica-
ment he rightly saw as a “complicated situation” (17). As a class, Creoles
were at once frustrated by their relative under-representation in metropolitan
decision making and colonial administration, and fiercely jealous of their

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT